- Email: [email protected]
Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes
doi:10.1016/j.cities.2004.04.006
Cities, Vol. 21, No. 4, p. 363–367, 2004 Printed in Great Britain 0264-2751/$ - see front matter
www.elsevier.com/locate/cities
Book reviews
Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, Wei Wei Yeo (Ed.); Routledge, 2003
Editors Ryan Bishop, John Phillips and Wei Wei Yeo have assembled an impressive group of scholars to write about the postcolonial urbanism of Southeast Asian cities within the theoretical framework of globalization from a multidisciplinary perspective. The book begins with an introductory chapter mapping the editors’ theoretical terrain, and each chapter is preceded by their comments on how it relates to postcolonial and postmodern theories. The collection of 14 essays is not organized into any particular thematic sections, theoretical formulations or regional groupings and assumes the readers’ familiarity with postcolonialism, postmodernism, French structuralism and cultural studies. Homi Bhabha has been quoted on the back cover asserting that this collection of essays has taken on ‘‘the urgent task of defining the urban conditions and the ethical and political conditionalities of the global environment as they are manifested in the Southeast Asian city.’’ Unfortunately, this confluence of postcolonialism, urbanism and globalization writings is not the Southeast Asian tour de force it promises to be. Without a doubt, the collection’s strongest works are contributions from its most established scholars. Anthony D. King’s important engagement in
the postcolonialism and postcolonial scholarship debate (Chapter 8) notes a disconnect between theory and data. George Marcus and Angela Rivas Gamboa (Chapter 11) draw on the latter’s research in Bogota, Colombia, to examine the connection between local national politics and globally oriented middle class denizens. Their research advocates the need for more descriptive data without resorting to ‘‘essentialist sins.’’ A remarkable piece is Richard Derderian’s ‘‘Urban Space in the French Imperial Past and the Postcolonial Present’’ (Chapter 5). His careful examination of Algerians and Vietnamese in Paris points to past colonial conflicts as explanations for the two groups’ differential orientation and experience in France. An equally well researched essay is Peter Jackson’s ‘‘Gay Capitals in Global Gay History,’’ in which he examines Bangkok’s same sex culture (Chapter 7). Emblematic of the postmodernist misadventure is Steve Pile’s ‘‘Perpetual Returns: Vampires and the Ever-Colonized City’’ (Chapter 13). The author examines the metaphorical Singaporean/Malaysian female vampire tempting lonely male drivers. The city is viewed as a place filled with legacies of feuds and desires where ‘‘blood gets sucked out of the living city through wide networks of exploitation.’’ But typical of the postmodernist approach, we are left without any substantial information on very real problems underlying this chapter. Whose blood is infected with AIDS? Who is willing to sell their blood for a few baht?
363
Whose blood is spilled chasing after the yen, the Sing dollar, or the ringgit? With only three scanty pages out of 18 devoted to Southeast Asia, the reader is left knowing more about the myths of Dracula in London and New Orleans than about the symbolism of pontianak in Singapore. Disappointed by the unfulfilled promises of vampires in Chapter 13, the reviewer is hard pressed to find the desire to read Rajeev Patke’s research on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project in Chapter 14 or a reason to care about Emma Reisz’s chapter on botanical gardens (Chapter 6). Bishop and Clancey’s ‘‘City as Target, or Perpetuation and Death’’ (Chapter 3) takes a long-winded approach to describe some very concise ideas, contorted by a puzzling choice of words as in the following introductory sentences: ‘‘Attention is another word for target. The city is a target for a range of catastrophes from natural disasters (such as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, and plagues) to those of more obvious human construction (chemical spills, factory explosions, and mass transit accidents or derailments), strategic geopolitical targeting (official military aggression to terrorist attacks). . .’’ (p. 63). The city may be a target in geopolitical policies but it is not a target of natural disasters. Earthquakes and floods do not choose their targets. If attention is another word for target, as the authors have suggested, why not use it? Unsure of the logic and impatient with the wordplay, I was one foolish reader to have read through the whole chapter.
Book reviews A number of articles address Singapore’s social identity. Wei Wei Yeo in ‘‘City as Theatre: Singapore, State of Distraction’’ (Chapter 12) examines a number of novels and theatrical performances hoping to shed light on city life and national identity. Yeo combines textual analysis with observation of the cultural scene to describe the hurried pace and superficiality of ‘‘life on the surface’’ and other new social activity associated with an urbanized and globalized city. The contradiction between Singapore’s self-perception as a global city and its insularity from its Malaysian and Indonesian neighbors is explored by Shirley Geoklin Lim, who draws on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of rhizomes to examine Singapore’s English-language narratives (Chapter 10). Singapore’s globalized connections with Western evangelicalism provide another dimension on the city’s social identity in Robbie Goh’s ‘‘Deus ex Machina: Evangelical Sites, Urbanism, and the Construction of Social Identities’’ (Chapter 15). Three particularly challenging essays draw on ‘‘hyper-postmodern’’ sensibilities to examine Southeast Asian cities and posit a number of interesting observations and perspectives on the subject. John Armitage and Joanne Roberts’ ‘‘From the Hypermodern City to the Gray Zone of Total Mobilization in the Philippines’’ (Chapter 4) draws on Paul Virilio’s ‘‘globalitarianism’’ to describe the totalitarianism behind the intense everyday life of the ‘‘deterritorialization and reterritorialization’’ of workers in the Export Processing Zone. James Rosenau and Diane Wildsmith’s ‘‘Jakarta as Site of Fragmentative Tensions’’ (Chapter 9) attempts to understand Indonesia’s intractable problems in terms of 12 separate global and local interest groups whose agendas and influences generate both integrative and fragmentative forces. Kathleen Adams’ ‘‘Global
364
Cities, Terror, and Tourism: The Ambivalent Allure of the Urban Jungle’’ (Chapter 2) analyzes Southeast Asian cities in terms of the new Western gaze of ‘‘urban danger zone tourism’’ adventure seekers. She describes the ‘‘desires of tourists to ‘experience’ politics—resistance, revolution, and war—in distant places and feel as if they are removed from and protected from the event themselves’’ which drives entrepreneurial individuals to capitalize on this emerging genre of travel. Tangled up in a thicket of hyper-postmodernist jargon are some essay gems. These chapters are innovative interrogations of Southeast Asia cities, corrective and insightful additions to the literature. Unfortunately, other chapters are merely postmodern misadventures in drive-by ‘‘research.’’ It is one thing to struggle through sentences inundated with postmodernist heuristic devices. It is a different matter altogether trying to understand passages such as the one below: One way to begin thinking through the aporias posited by predicative logic (which is not necessarily to suggest a way beyond them) is to consider the gestures provided by the middle voice, a voice that echoes throughout this volume. The middle voice offers a place of enunciation that is not necessarily spatially or temporally privileged, as is the case with predicative logic, for it speaks from the space at which the grammar of causation turns on itself. The middle voice allows us to understand that the ends of the continuum posited by Sassen and Jessop are just that, a continuum. The model of ‘‘the global city’’ posited by Sassen is no more idealized than the extreme relativism posited by Jessop that seeks to overturn singular models; for the radical relativism, paradoxically, requires a fixed temporal or spatial position from which the relativism is projected. The middle voice gestures toward a horizon of thought
that does not privilege the present moment or space of enunciation as a time and site from which a judgment, or law, emanates, be it Platonic model or manifold empirical exceptions to the model (Chapter 1, p. 11).
I am still scratching my head over that one. Those intending to assign the book for classroom use had better be prepared to provide reams of supplementary material, a glossary and a dictionary to help students navigate through its linguistic barricades. The task of learning about Southeast Asia is important, indeed urgent, and the issues are many and complex. It is unfortunate that much of this book’s scholarship is inaccessibly dense and Singapore-heavy. Southeast Asia can wait for my next visit. ChorSwang Ngin Department of Anthropology, California State University, 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90032, USA E-mail:[email protected]
doi:10.1016/j.cities.2004.04.007 Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic Development, the Environment, and Quality of Life in American Cities Kent E. Portney; The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, England, 2003, xiv plus 284 pages, paper, ISBN 0-262-66132-2
This book is premature. The author questions but does not satisfactorily answer what makes some cities take sustainability more ‘‘seriously’’ than others. His approach to the question is primarily through an examination of practices in cities that ‘‘seem’’ to take sustainability seriously, including the development of a type of seriousness-of-sustainability index. In eight chapters, Portney outlines differing concepts of sustainability (always a
Cities, Vol. 21, No. 4, p. 363–367, 2004 Printed in Great Britain 0264-2751/$ - see front matter
www.elsevier.com/locate/cities
Book reviews
Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, Wei Wei Yeo (Ed.); Routledge, 2003
Editors Ryan Bishop, John Phillips and Wei Wei Yeo have assembled an impressive group of scholars to write about the postcolonial urbanism of Southeast Asian cities within the theoretical framework of globalization from a multidisciplinary perspective. The book begins with an introductory chapter mapping the editors’ theoretical terrain, and each chapter is preceded by their comments on how it relates to postcolonial and postmodern theories. The collection of 14 essays is not organized into any particular thematic sections, theoretical formulations or regional groupings and assumes the readers’ familiarity with postcolonialism, postmodernism, French structuralism and cultural studies. Homi Bhabha has been quoted on the back cover asserting that this collection of essays has taken on ‘‘the urgent task of defining the urban conditions and the ethical and political conditionalities of the global environment as they are manifested in the Southeast Asian city.’’ Unfortunately, this confluence of postcolonialism, urbanism and globalization writings is not the Southeast Asian tour de force it promises to be. Without a doubt, the collection’s strongest works are contributions from its most established scholars. Anthony D. King’s important engagement in
the postcolonialism and postcolonial scholarship debate (Chapter 8) notes a disconnect between theory and data. George Marcus and Angela Rivas Gamboa (Chapter 11) draw on the latter’s research in Bogota, Colombia, to examine the connection between local national politics and globally oriented middle class denizens. Their research advocates the need for more descriptive data without resorting to ‘‘essentialist sins.’’ A remarkable piece is Richard Derderian’s ‘‘Urban Space in the French Imperial Past and the Postcolonial Present’’ (Chapter 5). His careful examination of Algerians and Vietnamese in Paris points to past colonial conflicts as explanations for the two groups’ differential orientation and experience in France. An equally well researched essay is Peter Jackson’s ‘‘Gay Capitals in Global Gay History,’’ in which he examines Bangkok’s same sex culture (Chapter 7). Emblematic of the postmodernist misadventure is Steve Pile’s ‘‘Perpetual Returns: Vampires and the Ever-Colonized City’’ (Chapter 13). The author examines the metaphorical Singaporean/Malaysian female vampire tempting lonely male drivers. The city is viewed as a place filled with legacies of feuds and desires where ‘‘blood gets sucked out of the living city through wide networks of exploitation.’’ But typical of the postmodernist approach, we are left without any substantial information on very real problems underlying this chapter. Whose blood is infected with AIDS? Who is willing to sell their blood for a few baht?
363
Whose blood is spilled chasing after the yen, the Sing dollar, or the ringgit? With only three scanty pages out of 18 devoted to Southeast Asia, the reader is left knowing more about the myths of Dracula in London and New Orleans than about the symbolism of pontianak in Singapore. Disappointed by the unfulfilled promises of vampires in Chapter 13, the reviewer is hard pressed to find the desire to read Rajeev Patke’s research on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project in Chapter 14 or a reason to care about Emma Reisz’s chapter on botanical gardens (Chapter 6). Bishop and Clancey’s ‘‘City as Target, or Perpetuation and Death’’ (Chapter 3) takes a long-winded approach to describe some very concise ideas, contorted by a puzzling choice of words as in the following introductory sentences: ‘‘Attention is another word for target. The city is a target for a range of catastrophes from natural disasters (such as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, tidal waves, and plagues) to those of more obvious human construction (chemical spills, factory explosions, and mass transit accidents or derailments), strategic geopolitical targeting (official military aggression to terrorist attacks). . .’’ (p. 63). The city may be a target in geopolitical policies but it is not a target of natural disasters. Earthquakes and floods do not choose their targets. If attention is another word for target, as the authors have suggested, why not use it? Unsure of the logic and impatient with the wordplay, I was one foolish reader to have read through the whole chapter.
Book reviews A number of articles address Singapore’s social identity. Wei Wei Yeo in ‘‘City as Theatre: Singapore, State of Distraction’’ (Chapter 12) examines a number of novels and theatrical performances hoping to shed light on city life and national identity. Yeo combines textual analysis with observation of the cultural scene to describe the hurried pace and superficiality of ‘‘life on the surface’’ and other new social activity associated with an urbanized and globalized city. The contradiction between Singapore’s self-perception as a global city and its insularity from its Malaysian and Indonesian neighbors is explored by Shirley Geoklin Lim, who draws on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of rhizomes to examine Singapore’s English-language narratives (Chapter 10). Singapore’s globalized connections with Western evangelicalism provide another dimension on the city’s social identity in Robbie Goh’s ‘‘Deus ex Machina: Evangelical Sites, Urbanism, and the Construction of Social Identities’’ (Chapter 15). Three particularly challenging essays draw on ‘‘hyper-postmodern’’ sensibilities to examine Southeast Asian cities and posit a number of interesting observations and perspectives on the subject. John Armitage and Joanne Roberts’ ‘‘From the Hypermodern City to the Gray Zone of Total Mobilization in the Philippines’’ (Chapter 4) draws on Paul Virilio’s ‘‘globalitarianism’’ to describe the totalitarianism behind the intense everyday life of the ‘‘deterritorialization and reterritorialization’’ of workers in the Export Processing Zone. James Rosenau and Diane Wildsmith’s ‘‘Jakarta as Site of Fragmentative Tensions’’ (Chapter 9) attempts to understand Indonesia’s intractable problems in terms of 12 separate global and local interest groups whose agendas and influences generate both integrative and fragmentative forces. Kathleen Adams’ ‘‘Global
364
Cities, Terror, and Tourism: The Ambivalent Allure of the Urban Jungle’’ (Chapter 2) analyzes Southeast Asian cities in terms of the new Western gaze of ‘‘urban danger zone tourism’’ adventure seekers. She describes the ‘‘desires of tourists to ‘experience’ politics—resistance, revolution, and war—in distant places and feel as if they are removed from and protected from the event themselves’’ which drives entrepreneurial individuals to capitalize on this emerging genre of travel. Tangled up in a thicket of hyper-postmodernist jargon are some essay gems. These chapters are innovative interrogations of Southeast Asia cities, corrective and insightful additions to the literature. Unfortunately, other chapters are merely postmodern misadventures in drive-by ‘‘research.’’ It is one thing to struggle through sentences inundated with postmodernist heuristic devices. It is a different matter altogether trying to understand passages such as the one below: One way to begin thinking through the aporias posited by predicative logic (which is not necessarily to suggest a way beyond them) is to consider the gestures provided by the middle voice, a voice that echoes throughout this volume. The middle voice offers a place of enunciation that is not necessarily spatially or temporally privileged, as is the case with predicative logic, for it speaks from the space at which the grammar of causation turns on itself. The middle voice allows us to understand that the ends of the continuum posited by Sassen and Jessop are just that, a continuum. The model of ‘‘the global city’’ posited by Sassen is no more idealized than the extreme relativism posited by Jessop that seeks to overturn singular models; for the radical relativism, paradoxically, requires a fixed temporal or spatial position from which the relativism is projected. The middle voice gestures toward a horizon of thought
that does not privilege the present moment or space of enunciation as a time and site from which a judgment, or law, emanates, be it Platonic model or manifold empirical exceptions to the model (Chapter 1, p. 11).
I am still scratching my head over that one. Those intending to assign the book for classroom use had better be prepared to provide reams of supplementary material, a glossary and a dictionary to help students navigate through its linguistic barricades. The task of learning about Southeast Asia is important, indeed urgent, and the issues are many and complex. It is unfortunate that much of this book’s scholarship is inaccessibly dense and Singapore-heavy. Southeast Asia can wait for my next visit. ChorSwang Ngin Department of Anthropology, California State University, 5151 State University Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90032, USA E-mail:[email protected]
doi:10.1016/j.cities.2004.04.007 Taking Sustainable Cities Seriously: Economic Development, the Environment, and Quality of Life in American Cities Kent E. Portney; The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA and London, England, 2003, xiv plus 284 pages, paper, ISBN 0-262-66132-2
This book is premature. The author questions but does not satisfactorily answer what makes some cities take sustainability more ‘‘seriously’’ than others. His approach to the question is primarily through an examination of practices in cities that ‘‘seem’’ to take sustainability seriously, including the development of a type of seriousness-of-sustainability index. In eight chapters, Portney outlines differing concepts of sustainability (always a